{"id":169,"date":"2018-12-23T16:01:39","date_gmt":"2018-12-23T16:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=169"},"modified":"2018-12-23T16:01:39","modified_gmt":"2018-12-23T16:01:39","slug":"felt-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/23\/felt-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Felt Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/14.12\/play.html?pg=7\"> Wired<\/a>, Marvin Minsky claims in “<a href=\"http:\/\/web.media.mit.edu\/~minsky\/E1\/eb1.html\">The Emotion Machine<\/a>” that “anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling.”<\/p>\n<p>In fact it’s <i>exactly<\/i> the reverse. Thoughts are a kind of <a href=\"http:\/\/cogprints.org\/1624\/\">feeling<\/a> (namely, what it feels like to be processing certain information: understanding X, meaning Y, believing Z).<\/p>\n<p>And there’s a world of difference between the two positions. Saying that feeling is just a kind of thinking (i.e., information-processing state) is saying nothing, because the fact that it is felt is precisely what makes whatever <i>kind<\/i> of “information-processing state” thought is <i>different<\/i>, and in special need of explanation. <\/p>\n<p>In contrast, saying that thinking is a kind of feeling — though it certainly doesn’t explain feeling! — makes it quite clear that it’s not just feeling pinches and seeing pink that need explanation, but also thinking X. <\/p>\n<p>Hence “thinking” cannot be used as an unexplicated bootstrap for explaining feeling: Just exactly what sort of thing conscious “thinking” is — as opposed to mere unconscious data-crunching — is part of the <a href=\"http:\/\/eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/7718\/\">problem<\/a>, not the solution!<\/p>\n<p>Zounds, how insouciant people can be, in the ways they keep begging this particular question! Sometimes they don’t have the faintest understanding (only the <i>feeling<\/i> of understanding).<\/p>\n<p>Which is yet another interesting property of cognition: There’s saying 2+2=4, understanding “2+2=4”, believing that “2+2=4” — and then there’s the further matter of whether 2+2 does indeed equal 4 (or whether snow is white, or F=ma, or april showers indeed bring may flowers…). <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>See: Harnad, S. (2001) <a href=\"http:\/\/cogprints.org\/2131\/\">Spielberg’s AI: Another Cuddly No-Brainer<\/a>. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to Wired, Marvin Minsky claims in “The Emotion Machine” that “anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling.” In fact it’s exactly the reverse. Thoughts are a kind of feeling (namely, what it feels like to be processing certain information: understanding X, meaning Y, believing Z). And there’s a world of … <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/23\/felt-thoughts\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> “Felt Thoughts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}